Against the view of Russell who degrades Aquinas’ philosophy, and considers it as a kind of application of Aristotle’s philosophy, this paper considers the revolutionary quality of Aquinas’s doctrine of essence wit...Against the view of Russell who degrades Aquinas’ philosophy, and considers it as a kind of application of Aristotle’s philosophy, this paper considers the revolutionary quality of Aquinas’s doctrine of essence within his natural philosophy according to his original works. It demonstrates the principale distinctions between Aquinas and Aristotle in the doctrine of essence in the four layers of the entity -nature, compositeness, particularity, and potentiality of essence, and shows that because of this, Aquinas not only overturns and reforms the Western traditional view of essence, but also forms and constructs an important corner from essentialism to existentialism in the Western history of philosophy.展开更多
文摘Against the view of Russell who degrades Aquinas’ philosophy, and considers it as a kind of application of Aristotle’s philosophy, this paper considers the revolutionary quality of Aquinas’s doctrine of essence within his natural philosophy according to his original works. It demonstrates the principale distinctions between Aquinas and Aristotle in the doctrine of essence in the four layers of the entity -nature, compositeness, particularity, and potentiality of essence, and shows that because of this, Aquinas not only overturns and reforms the Western traditional view of essence, but also forms and constructs an important corner from essentialism to existentialism in the Western history of philosophy.
